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How to uninstall a program in Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8
There are two ways to uninstall a program in Vista; the wrong way and the right way. Unfortunately, though, too many people uninstall a program using the wrong ways, which can lead to poor performance and problems on the computer. These wrong ways are delete the program's folder or just deleting the icons. When you attempt to remove a program in this way, there will be a large amount of configuration information left in the Windows Registry as well as files that may be installed in locations other than the program's folder. These orphan files and Registry data have the chance of causing conflicts on your computer thus leading to problems.
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Understanding Windows Update and Extras in Windows Vista and Windows 7
When software is created, whether it be operating systems or games, there is a good chance that a bug or security hole will rear its head over time. Software can be complex, with millions of lines of code in them. This amount of code and the complexity of a program invariably lead to mistakes or oversights. When these errors are found the software developer will usually release an updates that can be used to fix the errors.
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Setting up Windows Vista Parental Controls
With the launch of Windows Vista, Microsoft has introduced a new security feature called Windows Parental Controls. Windows Parental Controls allows a parent to configure, on a per user basis, various restrictions on what that user can do on the computer. These settings range from blocking websites to controlling what games they can play. Having access to these types of controls allows a parent to feel comfortable with their children using a computer and at the same time gives them the flexibility to customize these settings to their specific needs.
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Using Windows Easy Transfer to transfer your data to a new computer
When purchasing a new computer one of the most frustrating experiences is moving existing data to the new computer from the older one. In the past when you wanted to transfer data you had to copy the data via a network, store it onto a DVD/CD/Floppy and then copy it back onto the new PC, or physically take the hard drive out of the old machine and install it into the new machine. The main problem using these methods was that you could only move files such as documents, pictures, movies, saved games, etc. E-mail could be moved but was a difficult a process. Moving settings and program configurations, on the other hand, was not possible, except for the experts, and you had to reconfigure each of the applications on the new computer. Windows Vista changes all this with a new bundled application called Windows Easy Transfer that can easily migrate data from Windows XP SP2, Windows 2000 SP4, Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8 operating systems. It is important to note that though you can transfer data from Windows 2000, you can not transfer settings.
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Using Windows ReadyBoost to Increase Performance in Windows 8, Windows 7, and Windows Vista
Have you ever had an experience where you are using a lot of programs in Windows, or a really memory intensive one, and notice that your hard drive activity light is going nuts, there is lots of noise from the hard drive, and your computer is crawling? This is called disk thrashing and it is when you have run out of physical RAM and instead Windows is using a file on your hard drive to act as a virtual memory. Since writing and reading to a hard drive is much slower than reading from physical RAM, your computer's performance takes a huge hit.
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How to use the Windows Snipping Tool
The Snipping Tool is a program that is part of Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Window 8. Snipping Tool allows you to take selections of your windows or desktop and save them as snips, or screen shots, on your computer. In the past if you wanted a full featured screen shot program you needed to spend some money to purchase a commercial one. If you needed basic screen shot capability, past versions of Windows enabled you to take screen shots by pressing the the PrintScreen button to take a picture of your entire screen or Alt-Printscreen to take a screen shot of just the active window. This screen shot would be placed in your clipboard that you can then paste in another image program of your choice.
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Windows Vista Feature Guide
A Windows Vista feature is simply a set of programs or a particular capability of the operating system that can be enabled or disabled by an administrator. It is important to note that in Windows Vista, when you remove or disable a feature, you are not actually removing files from your hard drive, but rather just deactivating them. Therefore disabling a feature should not be used as a method of freeing up hard drive space. On the other hand, by disabling a feature you may gain an increase in performance due to memory and processor utilization no longer being allocated towards the particular feature.
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How to Shrink and Extend NTFS Volumes in Windows
In the past when you needed to resize a partition in Windows you had to use a 3rd party utility such as Partition Magic, Disk Director, or open source utilities such as Gparted and Ranish Partition Manager. These 3rd party programs, though, are no longer needed when using Windows as it has partition, or volume, resizing functionality built directly into the Windows Disk Management utility.
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How to find the command line arguments a program started with in Windows
Some programs provide the ability to add arguments when executing it in order to change a particular behavior or modify how the program operates. As an example lets look at the command line argument for Firefox called safe-mode. If you start Firefox with the command line firefox.exe -safe-mode Firefox will start without any extensions or themes. As you can see adding a command line argument to the program's executable changed its default behavior.
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How to delete or rename files and folders that are in use or locked in Windows
One of the more frustrating experiences when using a computer is when you want to delete or rename a file or folder in Windows, but get an error stating that it is open, shared, in use, or locked by a program currently using it.
